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Christmas begins with the birth of Jesus, but Dec. 25 wasn’t
officially designated as the Nativity until the 4th century – the early
Christians deliberately appropriated a holiday devoted to the sun-god,
Mithras, part of the Roman winter-solstice celebrations. Actual details
about the birth of Christ were scant, since he was born in obscurity,
and much of the narrative depends more on early biblical prophecies and
later artistic and theological licence than exact historic knowledge.
The story gets short shrift in the Bible itself – only gospel authors
Matthew and Luke, writing many years later, mention the Nativity, and
their brief stories differ widely. Luke describes a down-to-earth
version, with adoring shepherds and a more humble manger setting.
Matthew’s story, illustrated here in an elaborate 15th-century Italian
painting by Gentile da Fabriano, depicts the gift-giving Magi, “wise
men” from the East who follow a guiding star to Christ’s birthplace in
Bethlehem/
The Star of Bethlehem
According
to Matthew’s account, the Magi (plural of Magus, a learned court
astrologer), followed a star that directed them to the newborn king of
the Jews. This guiding light, which might be useful in dating the
Nativity, has never been identified: Comets, supernovas and planetary
conjunctions have all been considered as possibilities, but a moving
star that hovers over the birthplace belongs more to the world of the
miraculous. The Magi’s journey, Matthew says, took them by way of King
Herod, the local ruler based in Jerusalem, which establishes an
approximate date for the birth of Jesus.
Herod died around 4 BC,
so it’s assumed from this account that Jesus was born earlier, possibly
as early as 6 or 7 BC (since the nervous Herod supposedly ordered the
slaughter of all male children two years of age and under). Luke’s
account wrongly associates the birth with a Roman census that can be
placed in 6 AD, requiring citizens to return to their ancestral home –
and forcing the heavily pregnant Mary to travel cross-country to a
crowded town where “there was no room at the inn.” Historians say Luke
was simply trying to solve the problem of how Jesus of Nazareth came to
be born in Bethlehem as prophecies required.
Mary and the virgin birth
Mary
was an unmarried pregnant teenager betrothed to the much older Joseph,
who is usually described as a carpenter – their son later went into the
family business. According to Matthew’s narrative, they hadn’t slept
together, which caused some problems in the relationship. Fortunately an
angel appears to Joseph before he can do anything rash and tells him
that God is responsible for the pregnancy. This establishes Jesus’s holy
lineage effectively, and fits a pattern of miraculous births common to
the early life histories of great leaders.
It also neatly fits a
prediction of a divine virgin birth made by the prophet Isaiah, which
Matthew quotes (though some translators suggest that “virgin” here
simply means young girl, a teenager). Scornful rivals of the early
Christians, just to be nasty, crafted gossipy stories that Mary was in
fact impregnated by a Roman soldier. Some modern Christian scholars take
pride in Jesus’s illegitimacy, using it as evidence of his humble
universality. The virgin birth for them becomes part of a deliberate
theological plot over the ages to separate pure divinity from human
sexuality.
Animals, the scene-stealers
In his new book,
Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives,
Pope Benedict XVI makes a point of saying that the placid ox and donkey
sweetly depicted here, peering out of their cave-stable, never actually
made it to Jesus’s birth. He regards their presence in the
nativity-scene lineup as an embellishment added from hints in the Hebrew
Bible. Neither Matthew nor Luke specifically mention them, it’s true.
The Magi, according to Matthew, encounter Mary and her child in a house
that seems to be animal-free. Luke’s more rustic account has angel-sent
shepherds turning up at the manger – the animal feeding-trough, also
glimpsed here – where the newborn baby has to rest his head because
there is no free bed in busy Bethlehem.
Not to be impious, but
the Pope seems to be over-literal in his historicity. If we can accept a
stable as a birthplace (many scholars think it unlikely, but it at
least fits with Luke’s account of the Holy Family’s humility), then
animals can’t be far away. The shepherds’ bleating sheep often find
their way into paintings, crèches and Christmas pageants, and rightly so
– children identify with cute animals, even if serious theologians
think them sentimental. Scholars of the early Christian period note that
many families lived in close proximity to their animals, which adds
some earthy reality to the domestic scene. As a place for childbirth, of
course, it’s far from perfect.
The three wise men
The
crowns on the head of the three Magi suggest that they are foreign
kings, and not simply scholarly star-gazers linked to the Zoroastrian
priestly tradition – an assumption confirmed by their brocaded garments
and elaborate retinue of horsemen and exotic animals. Both in art and
later religious narratives, the brief story offered by Matthew of the
wise men who arrived from the East became elaborated into the kind of
lavish fantasy beautifully shown in the crowded extravagance of Gentile
da Fabriano’s painting.
The Magi became characters in themselves,
and are given the names of Balthasar, Melchior, Caspar (often depicted
as black-skinned) – their relics supposedly rest in Cologne Cathedral.
Storytelling apart, the Magi have an important role in the Biblical
narrative: As exotic Gentiles, or non-Jews, they represent the extension
of the baby Jesus’s mission into the wider world. And as wealthy men
going well out of their way to offer a peasant baby expensive gifts,
they symbolize the levelling power of the humble Christ-child.
The gifts of the Magi
The
Magi, almost as if they were trying to establish a Christmas tradition,
offer precious presents to the newborn child, described by Matthew as
gold, frankincense and myrrh. This itemization of gifts, strangely
enough, was later used to set the number of Magi at exactly three, a
number not found in the Bible but essential to carols such as
We Three Kings.
Gold was gold, expensive in itself – you can see Mary’s midwives
admiring the gold offering to her left. Frankincense, derived from tree
sap in the Middle East, produces the fragrant holy smoke of traditional
religious services. Myrrh is another aromatic resin, often used to
perfume dead bodies – a detail in Matthew’s birth narrative that some
scholars believe deliberately foreshadows the death of Jesus.
The painting and its patron
The
contented but strangely distracted face staring out at us from Gentile
da Fabriano’s painting belongs to Palla Strozzi, a wealthy Florentine
banker who commissioned this fanciful altarpiece for his family’s chapel
in the church of Santa Trinita – he also appears in a painting by Fra
Angelico holding the nails removed from Christ’s body after the
crucifixion. Strozzi was the richest man in Florence but more interested
in scholarship and the arts. He commissioned this Adoration of the Magi
from Gentile in 1420, and it was installed in the chapel in 1423 – it
now hangs in Florence’s Uffizi museum.
Like many rich
Florentines, he revelled in his wealth and the beautiful creations it
could buy, an attitude to extravagance that hardly fits the more humble
world view of Jesus and his earthly mission. Paintings of the Magi dealt
with this conundrum perfectly: They allowed a flattering depiction of
the patron’s world in all its sumptuous finery, using a story that was
appreciative of extravagance but also guilt-free. In the end, all that
money is serving faith and adoration.
A humbler version
Almost
hidden at the bottom of the altarpiece, positioned at peasant level if
you like, is the simpler alternate version of the story. There are no
Magi, no gifts, no crowds of rich and exotic hangers-on. This is the
bare-bones depiction of Luke’s narrative, a poor family making the best
of hard times, left to their own devices with faith in their fate. In
the distance, an angel gives the astonished shepherds the good news of
the baby’s birth, and soon they will join in with their adoration.
